4 - English Phonology and the Literate Speaker: Some Implications for Lexical Stress

Summary

0 Introduction

Reference to orthographic information is almost absent from phonological research, and one might ask why this should be. Is the question of the relationship between orthography and phonology considered as being ‘solved’ or is it simply ignored? Can phonology completely do away with orthographic information? This chapter argues that it should not and brings forward arguments which I hope will arouse interest for the links between these two representations of the signifiant.

Interest in the relationship between orthography and phonology has come mainly from psycholinguistics and reading acquisition. Several experiments have shown that orthographic information can influence tasks which do not involve any visual stimuli, such as rhyme judgement, lexical decision or auditory word recognition (Chéreau et al. 2007; Peereman et al. 2009; Perre and Ziegler 2008; Perre et al. 2009; Seidenberg and Tanenhaus 1979; Taft 2006; Taft and Hambly 1985). Brewer (2008) also found that the number of letters representing word-final voiceless obstruents had a positive influence of on the phonetic duration of these segments in both experimental conditions and spontaneous speech.1 Zamuner and Ohala (1999) found orthographic effects on syllable segmentation in preliterate children, for example cabin [kæ] – [bɪn] vs cabbage [kæb] – [bɪdʒ], although their experiment was replicated by Treiman et al. (2002), who did not confirm the results and only found orthographic effects in literate speakers. Significantly, an experiment on French speakers (Bürki et al. 2012) showed that a single orthographic presentation of a nonce-word is sufficient to induce a significant change in the phonological representation of that same nonce-word, which was constructed through 25 oral presentations of that word over several days. These results have been interpreted as signs that phonological knowledge is restructured when orthography is learned (Bürki et al. 2012; Ehri and Wilce 1980; Jaeger 1986; Perre and Ziegler 2008; Taft and Hambly 1985; Wang and Derwing 1986) and that this modification of the cognitive system is permanent. It might seem trivial to mention it but, as underlined by Jaeger (1986) and Laks (2005), learning how to read and how to write is a very long and tedious process and constitutes a powerful force to restructure phonological knowledge.